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Critics have used different terms to categorize the genre to which Pericles belongs. One common term is “tragicomedy,” which situates the play as a hybrid that mixes elements we’d expect from tragedy and comedy. The term applies to Pericles insofar as this play tells a story full of suffering, but it ultimately resolves with a happy ending for all its main players. Furthermore, the play features a mix of high-born and low-born characters and moves between both verse and prose dialogue, all of which also indicates a hybrid, tragicomic form.
But while Pericles certainly qualifies as a tragicomedy, critics also use another term that arguably captures the play’s essence more fully. That term is “romance.” In Shakespeare’s time, a romance wasn’t, as the term suggests today, a love story. Rather, a romance was an adventure story. The archetypal hero of a romance conventionally experiences some kind of disaster, which is followed by a series of events that add to his suffering, thereby testing his fortitude as well as his virtue. The true hero of romance maintains his honor despite his deprivation, and he ultimately finds a way to overcome the overwhelming odds against him.
Pericles is precisely this type of hero, and the play that bears his name follows him as he suffers through numerous trials that place him and his loved ones in mortal danger. His first trial comes already in the play’s opening scene, where he successfully decodes the riddle Antiochus has set out for all suitors of his daughter, the princess of Antioch. The punishment for failing to solve the riddle is death. However, when Pericles realizes that the answer to the riddle implies that father and daughter are engaged in an incestuous relationship, he quickly realizes that correctly answering the riddle may also be fatal. This turns out the be the case, and when Antiochus intuits that Pericles does indeed know the answer, he sends an assassin after him. Thus begins the series of trials that will cause Pericles much suffering over the course of the play.
It’s important to note that although Antiochus aims to kill Pericles, this conflict doesn’t function the same way as a major conflict might typically function in a story. Conventionally, the major conflict plays a significant role in structuring the events of the plot. In Pericles, however, the conflict between Antiochus and the prince of Tyre merely instigates the action. Indeed, not too long after Pericles evades the assassin sent to kill him, we learn through his advisor Helicanus that Antiochus and his daughter have been killed by the gods for their sins. Therefore, the animosity between these two men doesn’t last far into the play. But Pericles’s fear of the assassin leads him to make Helicanus his deputy and temporarily flee from Tyre.
It is this action that marks the true beginning of Pericles’s misadventures. After spending some time in Tarsus, where he delivers grain that saves the starving nation, Pericles sets a course back to Tyre, only to be shipwrecked in a violent tempest. He washes up onshore in Pentapolis, where no one knows him. Symbolically reborn by the sea, he participates in a jousting tournament that wins him the favor of King Simonides and his daughter, Thaisa, whom Pericles ends up marrying. But then disaster strikes again as Pericles and his pregnant wife set sail for Tyre. They run into another tempest, and Thaisa appears to die while giving birth. To quell the stormy seas, the crew believes that the dead body must be cast overboard, so they place Thaisa in a chest, throw it in the sea, and sail on. But fearing the infant won’t survive all the way to Tyre, Pericles returns to Tarsus and gives the girl Marina over to the care of Governor Cleon and his wife Dionyza, who owe him for saving their people by delivering grain. Promising to return for her, Pericles rushes back to Tyre to resume his reign.
In this way, Pericles, Thaisa, and Marina are all dispersed across the Mediterranean region—not just cut off from each other geographically, but also unaware of each other’s survival. Their dispersal sets them up as distinct and parallel sufferers, and the fortitude of each one will be tested. In Thaisa’s case, she washes up in Ephesus, where a wise physician revives her. At this point, she commits herself to a life of virtue as a priestess at the Temple of Diana. Marina’s story is more complicated. Fourteen years after Pericles deposits her in Tarsus, Dionyza decides to murder her because her beauty and virtue far outshines that of her own daughter. But before the assassin can strike, she is kidnapped by pirates. They in turn sell her to a brothel, where she refuses to relinquish her virginity and instead converts the clientele to chastity.
Once each of these characters has endured their own trials, Shakespeare begins the work of reuniting them. Pericles finally returns to Tarsus to collect Marina, only to learn of her apparent death at sea. Deep in mourning, Pericles wanders the sea aimlessly, only to arrive at Mytilene, where a chance encounter with Marina leads to mutual recognition and embrace. The powerfully resonant scene of their reunion represents the play’s emotional climax. The falling action then begins when the goddess Diana comes to Pericles in a dream and directs him to Ephesus, where he learns that his wife has indeed survived. With the family now fully restored, they set off to marry Marina to an honorable man from Mytilene, named Lysimachus. Once this happy union is cemented, Pericles and Thaisa will assume the throne in Pentapolis (where Simonides has recently died), while Marina and Lysimachus take over in Tyre.
It’s important to note, in closing, that the onstage action of the play is supplemented by the work of an intermittent narrator who both opens and closes the play and, as he says, “stand[s] in the gaps” between scenes “to teach you / The stages of our story” (4.4.8–9). This narrator is John Gower, the fourteenth-century poet who wrote the source material on which this play is based, and whom Shakespeare has “revived” to serve as a chorus. For the most part, Gower recounts events that have already taken place or presents silent pantomimes called “dumb shows” that advance the play’s action. That said, in his role as narrator, Gower also draws attention to the structural parallels and contrasts between characters. In this way, his role helps clarify the play’s thematic emphasis on virtuous familial relationships as well as the importance of honorable leaders.
